Trick essay

Choose a novel or short story in which a central character's failure to understand the reality of his or her situation is an important feature of the text. Explain how the writer makes you aware of this failure, and show how it is important to your appreciation of the text as a whole.







Joy Stone is a central character in Janice Galloway’s ‘The Trick is to Keep Breathing’ who fails to understand the reality of her situation. This essay will examine how Galloway makes the reader aware of this lack of understanding, and how important it is to the reader’s appreciation of the novel.

Joy’s mental state is made apparent from the beginning of the novel as she makes several desperate and paranoid sounding remarks, such as ‘They never give you any warning’ and ‘You never know…when the significance of the moment might appear’, immediately conveying her mental instability to the reader, and illustrating her distorted perception of reality. She no longer sees the world like everybody else, instead choosing to believe such improbable things as being able to ‘watch herself from the corner of the room’, which either means she feels disconnected from her body, or she keeps a mirror in the corner.

The idea of Joy’s mind seeing her body as a collection of disparate parts is revisited many more times in the novel, with Galloway at one point devoting an entire paragraph to the simple act of Joy getting out of a chair, using long and painfully slow sentences such as ‘releasing pressure and rebalancing in the chair to accommodate the tilting, adjusting, redistributing pieces of myself’. In doing so, Galloway effectively conveys the difficulty Joy is experiencing, with the long sentences mirroring the amount of time it takes for Joy to make the necessary effort to stand up, and the slow pace of the sentences mirroring the speed of Joy’s movements. It doesn’t make for particularly riveting reading, however.

Joy’s inability to understand her reality is also conveyed via the use of marginalia; these seemingly random and pointless words that sit on the edges of pages represent Joy’s subconscious thoughts encroaching on Joy’s conscious mind, and so show the astute reader that she is intentionally blocking out the truth of her situation; indeed, she first recognises this truth before the beginning of the timeline of the novel, in the house of her friend’s mother, Ellen. Joy says ‘I remember watching her face changing, and having to acknowledge then that something was wrong’, yet during the main portion of the book, Joy blocks out this realisation in favour of living in a dream world, shunning light and fearing water. The marginalia contains messages that pertain to Joy’s situation, usually in the form of warnings, yet the way in which they are continually blocked out makes Joy’s denial of the facts of her life clear to the reader, assuming said reader is still possessive of any vague interest in the novel by this point. Another giveaway is that the presence of the marginalia decreases drastically after Joy’s stay in the institution, as after this point, she listens to her subconscious and has fully realised her situation, therefore her subconscious has no need to ‘shout’ at her any more, and so the marginalia is absent thereafter.

All these techniques come together to reinforce the idea that Joy has lost all grip on anything resembling reality, but why is this important? Well, for a start, if it was absent, the novel would have even less of a plotline that it currently does, but the main purpose of Joy’s instability is to convey how much of an effect Michael’s death has had on her, how much he meant to her, and to put Joy’s actions in the rest of the novel into a believable context. This causes more forgiving readers to feel sympathy for Joy, and increases the likelihood of them reading the novel all the way to the end, where Joy is marginally less depressed. Joy’s lack of conscious understanding or acknowledgement of her situation is therefore a major feature of the text, one which adds depth and a semblance of credibility to the tale.

In short, Galloway’s main character most definitely fails to understand the reality of her situation, and Galloway makes use of many different techniques to convey this and to highlight its importance, making it an important feature of the text as a whole, and a feature that undoubtedly contributes to the reader’s appreciation of the text. This, however, assumes the reader has any appreciation of it in the first place.



Steven Thomson